Book 27, Question 124
What is a transistor, and why does a phone need billions?
A transistor is a tiny switch with no moving parts.
Made of silicon, it uses a small electric signal to turn a larger current on or off. The first one was built in 1947 at Bell Labs. Turning many switches on and off lets a computer follow instructions. A phone chip may have billions, each only a few nanometers wide.
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Quick answers
What is a transistor, and why does a phone need billions?
Transistors are made from semiconductors, which are materials like silicon that can conduct electricity under certain conditions.
Source: Georgia Tech
More fun facts
- The newest smartphone chips have nearly 20 billion transistors.
- Engineers have worked for decades to make transistors smaller, fitting more of them on each chip and enabling faster, more efficient computing.
- One of the most promising directions is vertical, or 3D, stacking, allowing chips to have more transistors without expanding the footprint.
- Each memory chip contains millions or billions of memory cells, the tiny circuits that store individual bits of data.
- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, has manufactured chips that contain around 100 billion transistors.
Sources: Georgia Tech